Via Tom
Mr. Chairman: Thank you very much for the opportunity to
appear before your subcommittee. I’ve waited many years for this moment.
Since the end of World War II the richest and most technologically
advanced country in the world has sent its Soldiers and Marines into
combat with inferior small arms. So inferior, in fact, that thousands
have died needlessly. They died because the Army’s weapon buying
bureaucracy has consistently denied that a Soldier’s individual weapon
is important enough to gain their serious attention.
The stories are a century old and as new as today. The venerable “Mu
Deuce” 50 caliber machine gun, the one most Soldiers use in mounted
combat, will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2019. Try to imagine any
service (other than our ground services) still holding on to a
centenarian for a weapon. The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon performed so
badly in Iraq and Afghanistan that the last commandant of the Marine
Corps wrote a check to get rid of it in infantry squads. He replaced it
with the superb HK 416, the finest automatic rifle in the free world. By
the way it was a German made HK, not an American weapon, that killed
bin Laden..
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